We need to think carefully about our pricing decisions when we figure how to price The Book of the Future. I understand this pricing strategy helps a publisher not lose money (fewer units at a higher price can actually drive a bottom line profit).
Average prices are going up, and average units sold is going down. There is something going on in our industry that needs to self correct. If you use this train of thought to guide your pricing decisions, you’ll do well. Tim O’Reilly has instilled this sort of thinking in all of us at O’Reilly. Obviously there are components that will help companies remain unique, but let’s get our industry moving in a healthy direction, together!Ĭreating more value than you capture is an essential ingredient for successful publishing in the future. When the industry defines and deploys the The Book of the Future, we need to make sure the industry is healthy by making the ideas, technology and models Open Source in spirit. What does open source do to the publishing ecosystem, make it larger and stronger? Margaret Atwood’s brilliant depiction of a part of the ecosystem, cautions publishing to neither accidentally or intentionally eliminate the author (part of the ecosystem).
How do you make money if you’re giving the content away? What is the cost of free? Most publishers won’t consider Open Source / Creative Commons licenses for some reason, yet those of us that do, are growing and thriving. We need to think about the industry and not individual company success. There are enough case studies showing how Open Sourcing your products actually creates a larger eco-system and a more vibrant market. This is a closed and proprietary view of doing business. I have heard over the years, that the publishing industry is like running with the slow kid on the block, so are going keep dragging our feet, or look for talent to bring in from other industries to help us create The Book of the Future.Ī natural reaction in a declining market, from most corporate entities, is to hoard their assets and keep them safely guarded with DRM and the like.
YOUTUBE XMLMIND SOFTWARE
Much more like a software company that releases early, often and continuous. Does our culture of building great, noble and scholarly works need to change to a more ‘fail forward fast’ mentality where we are meeting market demands in a “just in time” manner. As an industry, need to give Amazon a boatload of credit for forcing us all to be more innovative. Is Google the same company it was 10 years ago? Microsoft? Yet many in publishing have done very little to innovate and ignite this industry. Better enabling our authors will benefit everyone, including the cheese sandwich makers.Īs the landscape in publishing changes due to technology, disruption in market distribution, and a new generation of readers, will your company undergo a change in culture, staffing and leadership? When you compare the publishing industry to others, it looks as though we have moved quite slowly. So I think one component of The Book of the Future needs to center on making the upfront writing and creative work easy, intuitive, and productive for authors. There are other significant problems with XML - it’s based on the idea that content and appearance can be separated, so, as I already mentioned, it’s not particularly suited for books with significant art, or any type of book where the layout is part of the content. There are proprietary tool chains that work for some publishers relatively well but they are not shared with the industry. XMLMind, ASCIIDoc and Oxygen are the three that we recommend for creating easy to generate and use XML. They are not intended for significant works with lots of art, cross references, interesting layout. The existing XML tools on the other hand, are typically for the more geeky authors who write in mark up naturally. I know, many purport to offer XML conversion, but it is still an arduous process to clean up those conversions, and what a waste of time and resources. Yet most authoring tools that are easy to use, are horrible at getting usable XML out of the authoring environment.
Most publishers realized the inherent benefits of getting content into XML/DocBook. Easy-to-use authoring tools that enable content creation and distribution
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